April 2012

LRG in the News!

The LRG has popped up in the news twice in the last week. Executive Director, Norman Scherzer was recently interviewed for a New Jersey paper, the Bergen Record. Here are some highlights:

“Norman Scherzer has two basic goals: One is to remake the way cancer research is conducted in order to speed up… treatments and cures. The second is to put his organization out of business. He hopes that by accomplishing the first objective, he’ll inevitably achieve the second.

“When we had raised $2 million, I brought four [researchers] together [and] I told them ‘We want you to create a strategy and agree to cooperate.’ And then I turned to the institutions and told them, ‘You can only charge us 10 percent for overhead.’ Typically those charges are as much as 75 percent…Not one of them argued with us.”

“[Dr. Brian] Rubin explain[s], “Here we assemble a team and carve up the duties...It’s not a model a lot of us have used before, but it’s a very good idea...”

Go to www.northjersey.com/business/nonprofits/Innovating_cancer_research.html for the full article.

A recent issue of CancerWorld magazine featured GIST specialist, Paolo Casali. In the article, Dr. Casali discussed cancer advocacy groups’ future role in research:

“People who will be doing less wondering and taking more action, says Casali, are patients. ‘We can now add advocacy groups as a third category of trial sponsor… I believe they will drive a lot of research in future. More and more patients will not join studies that the groups do not approve of…’

“He was...taken a back when, at a GIST meeting, patients presented a study disregarding the ‘intent to treat’ principle in analyzing data. ‘I said I’d never heard in any medical congress someone challenging the principles of clinical research…’

A particularly active advocacy group is the US-based Life Raft, which is laying down its own model for allocating GIST research funds.

Go to http://www.cancerworld.org/cancerworld/home.aspx?id_sito=8&id_stato=1 for the full article.